Imran Khan

by Christopher Sandford

  That year Imran saw rather more of London than had been the case before, often staying at the Shepherd’s Bush flat of the journalist Qamar Ahmed. Also there while passing through town was another young rising Pakistani star, Javed Miandad, a ‘feisty little bugger’ of a cricketer, to quote one good friend. Javed, too, was beginning a four-year playing association with Sussex. According to Qamar Ahmed, ‘Imran was shy and not an extrovert, and remained so even after becoming an overnight star in that Sydney Test. He stayed with me off and on whenever he visited London. He was a lot younger person than me, basically quiet, and never any bother.’ Ahmed insists that Imran’s good nature extended toward his fellow house guest. ‘Javed was also very young, and competitive, when he joined Sussex. But he and Imran never spoke against each other. Even on tour overseas they were quite good mates and Imran would listen to him agreeably — in some ways Javed possessed a sharper brain cricketwise.’ For all that, the relationship would face a number of well-publicised snags in the years ahead. Imran would later be one of 10 players to issue a statement deploring Javed’s leadership of the Test side, and subsequently to refuse to play under him. Although the crisis was defused and they were to remain international colleagues for another decade, Imran appears to have harboured certain long-term reservations about the younger man’s character. ‘Javed’s man management was poor [and] he lacked the strength of will to drag the team along under his wing,’ he notes. I was told that Imran gave particularly short shrift to Javed’s ‘highly vocal’ complaints following the declaration that had left the batsman stranded on 280 in that 1983 Hyderabad Test against India. Coming across the 25-year-old Javed later that night in the Pakistan hotel, Imran reportedly remarked (in Urdu), ‘This is a team game, son. I don’t believe in playing for personal records.’

  Wasim Raja considered Imran ‘deeply sensuous’ and ‘somewhat cavalier’ as a cricketer, whereas ‘there wasn’t much sensuousness’ about the practical-minded Javed. ‘In most cases, [Miandad] would have one eye on the scoreboard, while Imran didn’t give a damn about averages — nor was he ever frightened to lose, if it came to that.’ Imran was interior, self-referring; Javed was more up front and superficial, concerned with material rewards and acclaim. Another well-placed source told me that where Javed was ‘obvious’, meticulous and ambitious, Imran was laid back, affable and self-contained. ‘You could buy most of what Javed had, if not his talent. You couldn’t buy what Imran had. He had something that’s inside.’ The result, as Wasim Raja observed, was ‘much detachment, some respect and a little distrust’, all part of an occasionally dysfunctional but long-running working relationship that was to be the making of modern Pakistani cricket.

  In his memoirs, Javed recalls a somewhat curious incident when he had acted as a peacekeeper between Imran and their mutual landlord Qamar Ahmed. Evidently miffed at something the journalist had written, Imran let loose one night with a whole series of complaints, including the observation that the Shepherd’s Bush flat was ‘a pigsty’. At that Ahmed rose to his and his home’s defence. ‘All of a sudden,’ Javed writes, ‘the two men were screaming four-letter words at each other and Qamar was sticking out his chest urging Imran to take a swing. I stepped in and put an end to it.’ If so, the scene would seem to reveal hitherto under-reported diplomatic skills on the part of Javed. (Wasim Raja, when I once ran the story past him, glowered in a pained way and eventually said, ‘Bit of a turnaround, isn’t it?’)

  When Imran began to play for Sussex, the club found him a small ground-floor flat next to the gates of the county ground in Hove. As a result he could commute to work in a minute or two, while London was only an hour away by train. Imran initially spent much of his free time with Javed, but soon reactivated his old social life. By early in his second season at Hove, he had ‘plugged himself in like an “Open” sign’, to quote one of his county colleagues. Accounts of Imran’s dating habits differ. According to his amused team-mate, ‘Immy was on the pull in London or Brighton on average four or five nights a week.’ He was allegedly vain of his appearance. The team-mate remembers Imran standing in front of the mirror grooming himself, smoothing down his thick hair, ‘adjusting the chain round his neck so it hung just so’, then happily padding off with his ‘feline lope’. According to others, Imran was actually ‘quite relaxed’ or ‘passive’ with the opposite sex, and more inclined to the role of the hunted than the hunter. The Sussex and England bowler Tony Pigott told me he had once been in a nightclub in Brighton with Imran and the county’s South African star Garth le Roux. ‘It was a mirrorball and Bee Gees sort of place; that whole thing … After a bit Le Roux and I chugged back from the dance-floor to the table where Imran was sitting alone with his glass of milk. “Come on and meet some girls,” Garth said, only to hear Imran’s superb reply, “No, thanks. If they want to meet me, they can bloody well come over here”.’

  On 9 May 1977, just as Imran was settling in to life in the Yorkshire leagues, the news broke that Kerry Packer and his Australian television network had signed some two dozen of the world’s top players to appear in an exhibition round under the name of World Series Cricket. It would be hard to exaggerate the ensuing shock in certain quarters. Among several perceived villains of the piece, the press heaped special scorn on the Sussex and England captain Tony Greig, who had acted as Packer’s recruiting agent. Greig appears to have convinced most of the players involved that a compromise would be swiftly reached whereby they would still be available for Test cricket. Imran was one of 14 non-Australians initially contracted to represent a WSC World XI in Packer’s circus, as much of the cricket establishment and media came to know it. There would be particular repercussions for Pakistan, which lost five leading players, including their captain Mushtaq, to the enterprise. For his services, Imran was paid Aus $25,000, or roughly the equivalent of £10,500, for some ten weeks’ cricket. At the time he was making a hard-earned £250 per Test, £3,000 a season for Sussex and a further £70–80 a month from PIA on the rare occasions he played in Pakistan — a total income of around £4,600 from all sources.

  Although Abdul Kardar had eventually resigned as chairman of the Pakistan board after the feud about match fees, his successor Mohammad Hussain took a similarly hard line when confronted with the latest demonstration of player power. The dispute that broke out in May 1977 soon threatened to make that earlier row look like a ‘little local difficulty’ by comparison. In short order, Hussain announced that the five Pakistanis who had signed for Packer would be ‘ostracised’ from Test cricket, adding that they were ‘unpatriotic … mercenaries [of] the worst stripe’. The board went on to assure the Pakistani public that there were ‘ample quality reserves’ available to cover for the defectors — a self-confidence not entirely borne out by events, in particular the 1978 Pakistan tour of England, which was a rout.

  At 9.30 in the morning of 30 July 1977, Donald Carr of the TCCB sent a telex to the secretary of Sussex confirming that ‘Imran Khan, the subject of our recent discussions’ was now free to play for the county. Two hours later, the subject in question was in action in a championship match against Gloucestershire at the College Ground in Cheltenham. He took two for 52 in the first Gloucester innings and one for 15 in the second; a respectable if not electrifying debut. Opponents, press and public were soon struck by the raw pace of the now visibly stronger, broad-chested bowler — he again took the opportunity to pepper Mike Procter with bouncers — but also by his versatility. His elegance, power and stamina (he could, and often did bowl unchanged all morning) were noted. Nevertheless, some reservations were expressed. Imran was lucky, it was agreed, to play much of his English cricket on the seamer’s paradise at Hove. Would the ‘languid-looking playboy’, as The Times called him, ‘succeed on slower wickets [or] when a really top-class batsman — Barry Richards, for example — [got] after him?’ One expert who didn’t hedge his bets was Geoff Boycott, who told me that ‘Sussex was the making of Imran. He’d had the talent but now he also had the brain and the spirit.
A great competitor. Like me, he’s a dragon in Chinese astrology.’

  In the event, Imran, or ‘Immy’ as, much to his distaste, he continued to be almost universally known, mocked the doubters. He took four for 66 and hit a rapid 59 (a third of his side’s total) against Glamorgan at Eastbourne. There were a further seven wickets in the win over Yorkshire at Hove, and commendably thrifty figures of 16–5–26–0 against a run-chasing Nottingham side, including Clive Rice, at Trent Bridge. Imran’s batting and bowling averages were good enough, but they failed to tell the full story: the way his best attacking shots appeared to be both fast yet totally unhurried, for instance, or how, in that curious way it has when struck by a great timer, the ball always seemed to gather pace on its way to the rope. And until statistics can indicate such factors as pride and the love of a fight they won’t adequately convey the mettle of such bowling performances as the one Imran gave in the county match against Hampshire at Hove. As mentioned, the Hove wicket often inclined to extravagant morning life, but it takes more than a helpful pitch to account for first-innings figures of five for 51 against arguably the county championship’s strongest batting line-up. Among Imran’s victims: Barry Richards.

  As he climbed the ladder of sports success, Imran made good and repeated use of a variety of role-models and patrons. Indeed, he could almost qualify as a professional protégé; there were enough men who were ‘like a father’ to him to make Imran look like Abraham in reverse. His cousin Javed Burki was one of the first. ‘If Javed told Imran it was eleven o’clock at night, even now Imran would believe him,’ Wasim Raja once remarked. At Worcester there had been the likes of Basil D’Oliveira, Henry Horton and Norman Gifford. The county secretary Mike Vockins, though too modest to say so, also appears to have been an avuncular presence in the young Imran’s life, as witnessed by some of their correspondence. Despite the later acrimonious events at the Cricket Council and the independent tribunal, much of this reads like the exchanges between a benign Victorian employer and a favourite junior. ‘I just wondered what my financial arrangement with the club might be this season, if any,’ Imran enquires politely in July 1974, while on tour of England with Pakistan. The following month, Vockins is able to reply with good news. ‘The Cricket Committee wish me to pass on this cheque for £200 [to] cover the difference between the remuneration you will receive from the BCCP and from us. Don’t spend it all at once.’ Fifteen months later, Imran writes to thank Vockins effusively for his help in re-registering him for Worcester and to assure him that ‘the terms offered to me are very satisfactory and I am quite content with their financial aspects’. Even as the storm clouds gathered in February 1977, Imran would find time while on tour of the West Indies to write to Vockins and ‘sincerely thank you for your many letters … [and] especially for your concern shown for my cricket career’.

  At Sussex, Imran’s chief benefactors were the county captain Tony Greig and their veteran fast bowler John Snow. The former recruited him to World Series Cricket. The latter helped mould him from a richly gifted, occasionally world-beating turn into one who could consistently deliver the goods on English wickets. Snow, then 35, was nearing the end of a colourful career that had brought him both 49 Test caps and a reputation as a somewhat enigmatic Jekyll and Hyde personality. Although a quiet man off the field with a taste for poetry, his aggressive playing style had seen its share of strife over the years, notably in the Test match at Lord’s in 1971 when he flattened Sunil Gavaskar in an attempt at a run-out. The bowler was then suspended by the TCCB, triggering some lively back-page articles fulminating against the ‘dodderers’ and ‘cretins’ responsible for the ban. Lest anyone miss the point, Snow entitled his 1976 autobiography Cricket Rebel. More pertinently, he was a consistently helpful and generous de facto coach to Imran, who, as Boycott notes, now became ‘not only a very fast bowler but a very clever one’. Some 15 years later, much would be made of the reverse swing phenomenon, that cricketing sleight of hand and aero-dynamical oddity whereby bowlers such as Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis appeared to make the ball mysteriously veer off its true path. Imran was already practising this technique with some success in 1977. The Surrey and England batsman Graham Roope told me of an end-of-season game played ‘in front of three men and a dog at The Oval’ when Imran had appeared and suddenly ‘made the old ball boom around at right angles’. There had been some ‘disbelieving stares’ and ‘subsequent muttering’ in the Surrey dressing-room, though Roope was at pains to stress that this was down to the shock of the new on the players’ part, ‘like African tribesmen seeing Concorde flying over for the first time’. Javed Miandad adds that ‘the combination of pace, guile and reverse swing made Imran absolutely lethal. He started predicting his wickets … He would often tell us he’d spotted a weakness in the batsman and how he was going to get him next ball. And sure enough he would.’

  Sussex finished the 1977 season with home fixtures against Middlesex and Kent, who went on to be the joint county champions. Imran’s contribution was a modest one wicket in each match, the latter of which was curtailed by rain. In his first five weeks of cricket in new colours he took 25 wickets at an average of 22.04, better figures than those recorded by the likes of Joel Garner, John Shepherd, Vanburn Holder and Clive Rice, all of whom were appearing on the county circuit. For its part, the Sussex yearbook describes the side’s eighth-place finish as ‘satisfactory’, which perhaps carries the echo of one of those hospital bulletins describing the condition of a terminal patient as ‘comfortable’. In fact, it was a significant under-achievement for a side which included players of the calibre of Javed, Greig, Mendis, Parker, Barclay, Snow and Imran himself, though even that eclipsed Worcestershire’s ‘sorry showing’ at 13th.

  Meanwhile, World Series Cricket was formally launched on 16 November 1977. It was not the immediate commercial success Kerry Packer had hoped: there were 1,690 paying spectators scattered around the Football Park, Adelaide, to see the inaugural Australia v. World XI fixture, which the visitors won, on 10 December. The first so-called Supertest between the Australians and the West Indians fared little better, attracting some 6,000 first-day fans in a Melbourne stadium seating 37,000. It’s said that before certain WSC matches Packer could be seen disconsolately counting the cars in the parking lot. Nonetheless, the ‘circus’ was an idea whose time had come: night games were introduced; pads and balls changed colour; Dennis Amiss walked out to bat wearing a motorcycle helmet, a fashion that caught on. Packer and his managers made much play of the gladiatorial aspect of fast bowling, whose ‘super-sizzling’ and ‘sexy’ proponents — namely Imran, Lillee, Procter, Holding and Roberts — became WSC’s most feted superstars. The organisers weren’t shy about marketing their men, either, kitting them out in T-shirts emblazoned with the slogan ‘Big Boys Play at Night’, among various other lewd endorsements. For the first time in the game’s history, cricketers were routinely staying in luxury hotels and being driven around in limousines. Thanks to Packer’s ownership of his own television station and virtually unlimited advertising budget, the whole enterprise came to unite Australia as little else could. Along the dark miles of desert highway, the reassuring points of light were huge billboards featuring smouldering close-ups of the more photogenic WSC recruits. As Imran says, ‘a major feature of Packer cricket was the personalisation and packaging of players … In the absence of patriotic passions the game was promoted by emphasising its entertainment value and by glamourising certain individuals’ — none more so than himself.*

  Perhaps predictably, the Pakistani authorities reacted to the Packer affair with all the decorum and restraint of a Fawlty Towers fire drill. When Imran arrived at Karachi airport for an aborted attempt at a reconciliation with the BCCP, ‘the customs officers eyed my luggage as if I was carrying gold bars … I heard remarks like “I’d play for my country for nothing”.’ For their parts Abdul Kardar and Mohammad Hussain competed to heap abuse on ‘the mercenaries’ and more particularly on Imran, whose effigy was burnt outside
the main gate of the Gaddafi Stadium in Lahore. Following that there were widespread street demonstrations against the ‘traitors’ and ‘double-crossers’, some of whose family members also received death threats. By contrast, the influential cricket commentator and sometime administrator Omar Kureishi felt able to issue an invitation on what he called ‘the highest possible authority’ for three of Pakistan’s WSC players to fly back from Australia for the 1977–78 home series against England — which they did, only to have the door slammed in their faces.

  Farce first stalked the proceedings when Imran, Mushtaq Mohammad and Zaheer Abbas returned to Pakistan to play in the third and final Test of the series, at Karachi. Or so they thought. Both the previous Tests had been ill-attended draws, after the second of which the army chief of staff (and state president in waiting) General Zia-ul-Haq reportedly advised the board to ‘pick the best team available’ or to ‘personally face the consequences’. Despite this high-level intervention no BCCP officers were on hand at Karachi airport to welcome the three returning WSC players — nor officials of any kind. The anti-Packer contingent, however, was there in force. Imran was eventually able to make his way through the protesters and on to a perhaps over-full minibus, which reportedly deposited him at the home of a friend near the National Stadium. He arrived at the trim, white-walled ground the next morning, to be met by a small but vocal crowd of demonstrators but, again, no formal reception committee. Imran had apparently had some trouble in gaining access to the pavilion and had to knock repeatedly, while curious onlookers gathered round him, before making his way in through the groundstaff entrance. There were supposedly similar difficulties when it came to his being admitted to the home dressing-room. At length Imran was able to change into his whites and report to Mohammad Hussain and his fellow selectors, who greeted him ‘with a mixture of hostility, surprise and amusement that [I] thought [I] was going to play’. Even that reaction was positively effusive compared to the response of the new Pakistani captain, Wasim Bari, who looked Imran up and down and asked him, ‘Who the hell invited you here?’